Now We Will Sit Around and Wait for the Debates

You probably noticed that this has been a weird, boring week in the presidential race. After all the tumult of the couple of weeks before—the leaked "47 percent" videos and Romney's tax return—we seemed to break very little new ground, other than some minor skirmishing over the U.N. meeting. Which is odd, considering that there are now only 39 days left until Election Day. But actually this is a good illustration of today's media-driven campaign cycle: nothing happened because we, as the press, decided that nothing was going to happen until the debates.

Crass? Lazy? Maybe. But we know this: over the last several weeks, Romney has careened from one self-inflicted disaster to the next, and state-level polling has shown him facing wideningdeficits in the key states. He doesn't seem to be improving as a candidate, and when he opens his mouth in unscripted settings, things go badly for him. (Even the candidates appear to agree that we're not going to learn much from another stump appearance or three: they're both heading off the trail this weekend to hunker down for multi-day prep sessions.) The approach of the debates always exerts a kind of black-hole-like pull on journalists—gotta get that curtain-raiser posted!—but Romney's verbal handicap only heightens the feeling that if a fading race is going to be reinvigorated, it'll happen up there on stage, as the candidates (and, once, their understudies) clash weekly over the course of October, live in your living room. So: prepare to tune in. And you can ignore that U.N. stuff.

Oh, and check out our own Robert Draper's excellent take on the debates in the October issue, or online here.Read more on Death Race 2012